MariaDB has capped off a dazzling year with the release of a beta of Version 10 of the free MySQL replacement.
The beta of the database was announced on Thursday and sees the technology gain some features that can't be found in the MySQL database upon which it is based, further driving a wedge between it and the Oracle-backed …

COMMENTS

MariaDB, MariaDB, MariaDB.

Can't avoid reading about MariaDB lately, sounds quite exciting. As a dev whose been using MySQL in a predominantly PostgreSQL community for some time, it's a breath of fresh air for there to be a bit of a buzz around MySQL for once!

"You do nothing - you never make mistakes"

Recently there's been a lot of hype around MariaDB - and that's nice to see. Unfortunately it happens that every now and then they release something that for example has memory leaks - but hey - only those that do nothing have empty "error registers".

I am very much looking forward to getting my hands on MariaDB 10 release - with all the replication goodies this will be a killer product.

Could Oracle not simply merge in the changes from MariaDB? Both projects are after all open source at their base level. So you could just end up with a situation where MariaDB merge stuff in from MySQL and then n turn MySQL merge stuff in from MariaDB. So both could stay fairly feature on parity, minus the paid extras that Oracle does not open source.

As I understand it, Oracle own MySQL so they can license it how they like - it does not HAVE to be FOSS. If they adopt MariaDB code under the GPL, then they will no longer be able to license it in they way they choose and all downstream versions would be GPL.

Given that, they may as well just offer commercial support for MariaDB, and and retain ownership of the increasingly unpopular MySQL.